Fairphone: the most important tech product of my generation.

I work for a tech company and although we work very hard to minimise the impact we have on the world, we have to work within a deeply dysfunctional industry.  The insatiable demand for new devices - and phones are the worst - has created an obscenely complex and heartless supply chain and ever-more complex products with ever-shortening lifespans.  

Environmental and social concerns were left for dead by the industry years ago and we have all be complicit in ignoring the terrible impact our ambivalence and greed is having on our planet.  It doesn't matter if you're Apple, Android, Blackberry or Windows, they are all guilty  of sucking up ultra-precious resources at a terrifying rate (from some barbarous places) and none are seriously trying limit their avaricious rampage.  And why should they?  No one is seriously asking  them to.  So it's very obviously time for a change.

It will take a monumental amount of effort, courage and investment to break this cycle, but I am super-excited by the Dutch Fairphone project.  It's one of those things that everyone who claims to be environmentally minded should support - and buy - immediately. It's expensive when you can get a free handset with a contract, and the first ones probably won't be as good as an iPhone5, but it will have a pure soul, rich with righteous purpose.  And so will you.

Please help it to get off the ground.

Fairphone: Buy a phone, start a movement from Fairphone on Vimeo.

The website is full of great stuff, and the following is lifted directly from there.

'The entire global supply chain is too complex and overwhelming to be addressed as whole. Which is why we’re starting with a single product. One, single, open, high-performance smartphone made as fairly possible with a transparent supply chain. One step at a time.

Our smartphone is a practical starting point for telling the story of how our economy functions. Producing a phone lets us tackle the big questions and challenges we face from a human perspective. It’s an everyday object that nearly everyone owns, uses or can identify with. It’s both a tangible device and a great symbol of our connected, social world.

But the phone is not a solution in and of itself – it’s simply a vehicle for change. We’re revealing its story, understanding how it’s made and producing an alternative. By buying this phone, you’re reconfirming that collective action counts and becoming part of a community that has the power to fuel change.

Us & You

At the end of the day, the real story isn’t about the economy, the phone or the community. It’s all about you.

You are the privileged, informed individual that has the ability to be part of the solution. You might not think that one action matters, but together our actions can truly make a difference. With a few small steps, you just might change our story’s ending.

Fairphone is more than a phone. It’s a beginning.

Fairphone started in 2010 as an awareness project about conflict minerals in electronics and the wars that the sourcing of these minerals is fuelling in the DR Congo. Fairphone is an intiative by Bas van Abel (then Creative Director at Waag society – an institute that develops creative technology for social innovation) and ran for 3 years before Bas van Abel realised that if he really wanted to uncover the story behind the sourcing, production, distribution and recycling, he needed to make the phone. Bas van Abel’s drive comes from his desire to open up things and reconnect people to the things they own. His motto, taken from the maker’s movement is ‘if you can’t open it, you don’t own it”.

http://www.fairphone.com/

Chris Hadfield's Overview Effect

Commander Chris Hadfield is leaving the International Space Station (ISS) today, and I am going to miss him very much.  He has been using Twitter to post pictures he's taken from the station, looking down on our beautiful but fragile world, with awesome effect.  From 200 miles up he watched 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets every 24 hours, and by his own admission, rushed to the windows with his camera at every given opportunity.

Plankton Blooms seen from the ISS

Most astronauts describe how seeing the earth as a whole, from space, with fresh eyes, changes your perspective. The Overview Effect as it is known was once the privilege of a very select few who had been into orbit, but Chris Hadfield has given that perspective to all of us.  And then some.  I haven't been so captivated by a space mission since the days of Skylab in the 70's.

“Who’d have thought that five months away from the planet would make you feel closer to it?” he mused, in a goodbye video filmed with the blue planet glowing in the windows of the ISS’s observation deck. “Not because I miss it, but because seeing the planet this way and being able to share it has allowed me to get a direct reflection back, immediately, from so many people, that it makes me feel that this experience is not individual but shared.”

all pictures by Cmdr Chris Hadfield from the ISS

In Tom Chivers' excellent piece for the Telegraph he ponders the scientific use of the ISS. 

'Perhaps the primary mission of the space station shouldn’t be one of scientific discovery, but of inspiration. For decades, mankind’s push for space was military-led, secretive. The idea of the commander of a mission sending back videos of himself wringing out a wet cloth to show how water behaves in zero gravity, or explaining why you need to be careful making a sandwich in space (crumbs, you see), would have been unthinkable.

'More than a stern-faced officer-scientist or boy’s-own-adventure hero, what space exploration needs now is an advocate: someone who can remind us why we wanted to go to the universe on our doorstep in the first place.'  Hadfield, with his mischievous sense of humour, (if a film is made of his life, he wants to be played by “someone with a good moustache”), approachable demeanour and palpable awe at what he sees, has been the perfect spokesman for the cosmos.'

'It is perhaps ironic, though, that he has created such excitement not with pictures of Saturn’s rings or distant nebulae – which robot space explorers such as the Cassini-Huygens probe and the Hubble telescope have sent us – but with a new perspective on our own pale blue dot. Pictures of a river in Bolivia lit up by the sunrise and glowing like a firework, or of Vesuvius, looking straight down the volcano’s caldera, have come as a reminder that our planet can compete with the wider universe for remarkable sights.'

Thank you Chris Hadfield.  What a pleasure and a privilege it's been to share your amazing ride.

The Overview Effect film

The Overview Effect, first described by author Frank White in 1987, is an experience that transforms astronauts’ perspective of the planet and mankind’s place upon it. Common features of the experience are a feeling of awe for the planet, a profound understanding of the interconnection of all life, and a renewed sense of responsibility for taking care of the environment.

‘Overview’ is a short film that explores this phenomenon through interviews with five astronauts who have experienced the Overview Effect. The film also features insights from commentators and thinkers on the wider implications and importance of this understanding for society, and our relationship to the environment.

OVERVIEW from Planetary Collective on Vimeo.